We consider the maximum covering problem, a combinatorial optimization
problem that arises in many facility location problems. In this probl
em, a potential facility site covers a set of demand points. With each
demand point, we associate a nonnegative weight. The task is to selec
t a subset of p > 0 sites from the set of potential facility sites, su
ch that the sum of weights of the covered demand points is maximized.
We describe a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) for
the maximum covering problem that finds good, though not necessarily o
ptimum, placement configurations. We describe a well-known upper bound
on the maximum coverage which can be computed by solving a linear pro
gram and show that on large instances, the GRASP can produce facility
placements that are nearly optimal.